In my previous post about time management in the consulting business I outlined my process for getting through my work. It should be obvious that I didn’t mention anything about tracking your time with timesheets. Timesheets are something that I am notoriously bad at, so if anyone has any useful tips/tools for doing timesheets I’d love to hear them. I’ve already heard of the:
- Record your time every day pattern.
- TimeSnapper.
In terms of time I get into the office and time I leave, I typically boot up my VPC when I get into the office and shut it down when I leave. I can just check the eventlog to determine those times.
I hate places that make you track time against each task. I typically cross-refernence those tasks against the timestamps on my Trillian chat logs, email, and bug tracking entries to determine when I started/stopped working on things.
I suppose this suggestion is part of the “record your time every day pattern”, but I’ll give it anyway. As a remote employee, I need to log in to a website to enter my timesheets. A few months ago, James Shaw turned me on to using Windows XP’s Scheduled Tasks to automatically launch IE and navigate to the timesheet website, at 5:00 PM every day. This little trick, combined with my resolution to myself that I would do the timesheet daily, has made a huge difference. And I find myself logging more hours this way, rather than trying to do it weekly, or in some cases, monthly.